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Are you optimizing your website for voice search? If not, you need to start now, as voice search is more popular than ever, and it will continue to grow over the next few years as even deeper investments are made into the field by companies across the business world.

Mary Meeker’s annual internet trends report shows that 20% of mobile searches were made using voice in 2016, a number that continues to rise as technology companies refine and improve their digital assistants. Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are all major performers in the digital assistant game, and many expect this technology to become almost ubiquitous in households in the upcoming years.

Technology companies and retailers have certainly noticed, and they are moving further in directions that take advantage of the growing rise of voice search. One such example is the recent partnership between Google and Walmart. The two giants partnered on a deal that allows customers to "voice shop" through Walmart's Easy Reorder program via Google Assistant. This is all done through Google’s shopping service, Google Express.

After this deal, Google announced that they are waiving all fees for their Google Express shopping service, promising free delivery in 1-3 days as long as the customer meets the retailer’s minimums. This signals the seriousness with which Google is entering this agreement, as they hope the waiving of fees will remove a barrier to entry and convince more customers to switch from online services like Amazon.

What this means is that customers can shop for hundreds of thousands of products at Walmart just by talking to their digital assistant, integrating voice search and shopping online in a way that’s never been done before. While Walmart is the biggest retailer as part of Google’s shopping and delivery service, it's not alone, joining retailers such as Costco, Whole Foods, Bed Bath & Beyond and more.

This shows some of the potential future uses that we will see from voice search, with tech and retailers joining together to take advantage two growing trends: online shopping and voice search through digital assistants and mobile devices. U.S. e-commerce grew 15% in 2016, a number that seems likely to rise as options increase and brick-and-mortar stores continue to experience troubles.

We know that optimizing for voice search is different than optimizing for traditional search. A different SEO optimization strategy is required, and those that are quicker to adopt it will see huge benefits as it continues to grow. With over 15 years of experience in digital marketing, we have seen firsthand the different strategies companies need to pursue and the results they can provide.

So what can you do to prepare your clients for voice search? First, recognize that the change is here to stay, with ComScore projecting that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. (On that note, our own internal research shows that voice searches tend to be more action-based than text searches, with voice search users showing intent to act rather than simply searching with no purpose of acting on it.)

Second, when your clients think about their business, help them to think about the problems they wish to solve and then write content that answers these questions to help customers. In this way, keyword research can be tougher but can lead to more direct results that help people find solutions.

Once you and your client have thought about the best terms and questions to target, look up the results that Google provides, especially if there is a Google Answer Box. Think about ways to more directly answer the question being posed. In voice searches, these are the answers that get read aloud, and therefore have a high likelihood of drawing a customer in.

Finally, think about how people actually talk and target those long-tail keywords in your voice search SEO approach. Put these answers at the top of your clients' pages, ideally in the first sentence, to let Google know that you are answering the question that the searcher is researching.

If it wasn’t already clear, two of the biggest companies in the world partnering around the growing force of voice search shows that it is more important than ever before to optimize for voice search. If you don’t, you simply risk getting left behind in a changing online world.

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